Master showman Buffalo Bill is credited with revealing the mystique of the American West to the world. Nearly a century after the legend’s death, master curator Steve Friesen is credited with evolving the roadside attraction built to honor him into a first-rate museum of Old West mythology.

The Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, high atop Lookout Mountain, has been named the Western Museum of 2011 by True West magazine.

“We love that museum, and you can’t beat the view,” said True West executive editor Bob Boze Bell, an Old West buff who first visited the museum in the 1970s. “It was cool to be there because that’s where Buffalo Bill ended up. But otherwise, it was just OK. Now it’s really good, and that shows you how one person can make a difference.”

Bell said director Friesen has helped the museum become a top folk-history institution that houses innovative exhibits and important collections.

Bell is also a fan of Friesen’s 2010 biography, “Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary,” calling it “absolutely exceptional,” particularly for its debunking of the long-held myth that a military tank was sitting on Buffalo Bill’s grave to protect it from people in Cody, Wyo., who planned to steal the man’s remains.

Buffalo Bill — born William Cody in 1846 — was America’s first celebrity, a buffalo hunter and scout who became internationally famous for his Wild West shows that toured Europe, including Great Britain, and the U.S.

“He exported the West to the entire world,” Bell said. “He was the Beatles world tour of 1888.”

Passion remains intense

Friesen recently returned from a trip to Europe, where the passion for the Old West stoked by Buffalo Bill remains intense.

“Folks in Europe just love the Wild West,” said Friesen, who has headed the Denver-owned museum since 1995. “It’s something they don’t have. They have cowboy clubs and Indian clubs, where they dress like that.”

Friesen has a friend who owns a Western shop in downtown Brussels. Doors in the shop’s wooden front open with handles made from buffalo nickels.

“When you walk in, the smell hits you,” he said. “It’s like stepping into the Wild West.”

Friesen has found inspiration by working alongside the spirit of Buffalo Bill for 16 years, walking past his buckskin jackets, beaded gauntlets, Stetson hats and Winchester guns on a daily basis.

From his office, Friesen gazes out at a painting that hung in the parlor at Buffalo Bill’s TE Ranch near Cody. “The Life I Love” — painted by C.S. Stobie, a frontier artist who befriended people such as Wild Bill Hickok and Kit Carson — depicts Buffalo Bill with a hunting party in 1902.

“It qualifies as folk art,” said Friesen, who earned a master’s degree in American folk culture from the State University of New York’s Coopers town Graduate Program.

Many from that program have gone on to work in small museums across the country, from the Paul Revere House to the Noah Webster House to the Ozark Folk Center, where an alumnus helped build the Ozark Cultural Resource Center into a major research facility.

Small museums often have a folk emphasis, said Friesen, who also worked as director of the Molly Brown House.

“They’re very grassroots,” he said. “You’re dealing with the legends. The story of the Wild West is the formative myth for the United States in the same way that the Knights of the Round Table are for Britain.”

His background is in material folk culture, which fuels his passion for collecting relics and artifacts from Buffalo Bill’s world.

The museum dates to 1921, a few years after Cody was buried in Lookout Mountain Park. Its recent acquisitions include a photo album, assembled by a Wild West show performer and filled with behind-the-scenes shots, and a hand-tooled saddle used by a rider in the show.

“America’s first superhero”

Through Friesen’s connections, the museum also received the donation of a nearly complete collection of Street & Smith dime novels, which will be the core of a special exhibit that opens Feb. 26.

The exhibit will explore Buffalo Bill as a hero of dime novels, which laid the groundwork for comic books.

“In some ways, he was America’s first superhero,” Friesen said.

Collecting such Western artifacts led Friesen to write the Buffalo Bill biography. Many fans of the Old West were stunned by some of Friesen’s discoveries.

For years, people believed that a tank on Buffalo Bill’s grave — captured in a 1919 photograph — was there to protect it from grave robbers who wanted his body back in their state of Wyoming.

But after an exhaustive search, Friesen tracked down an original newspaper article that refuted the tale.

“In reality, the tank was up there to help raise money for war bonds after World War I,” he said. “They drove this tank up Lariat Trail from Golden, fired a shot over the grave, almost like a salute, then went on to their next destination.”

Now that the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave has been touted in the September issue of True West, Bell expects readers to begin making pilgrimages.

“Our readers are heritage travelers,” he said. “It’s a niche market, but these people are passionate about the West.”

A roundup of Western sights and sounds

The Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave’s annual “Buffalo Bill Western Roundup,” one of the events that spurred True West magazine to name the popular tourist attraction the Western Museum of 2011, will take place from noon to 4 p.m. Sept. 25.

Performers dressed as Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley will be there, along with American Indians, who will talk about their culture. Also featured will be craft demonstrations, hands-on activities for kids and the firing of a Civil War cannon. Admission to the event is free.

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